Tag: Louis James

The Gold Report: Jeff Clark, senior precious metals analyst at Casey Research, recently wrote in an article titled "Time to Admit that Gold Peaked in 2011?" that countered a chart making the rounds showing gold matching its 1980 inflation-adjusted dollars peak in 2011. The chart implies we should expect a decade or more of lower prices. Aside from the fact that John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics might have a problem with how inflation was calculated, how are gold's fundamentals different today than they were in 1984?

Louis James: The fact that things are different today than in the 1980s is a really good point. The argument over methodology almost doesn't matter. Even if it were true that the gold price of 2011 matched the inflation-adjusted gold price of 1980, that wouldn't mean that gold has to go down the way it did in 1980. There wasn't a near collapse in the banking sector back then. There wasn't the Lehman Brothers upset. The government did not triple the money supply. We're dealing not with apples and oranges, but apples and whales.

By: Louis James, Chief Metals & Mining Investment Strategist

It is with a troubled heart that I look at the continued fighting in eastern Ukraine. I worry about my friends and students in the country who may well be in physical danger soon, if the conflict escalates. As an investment analyst, it’s the financial war the Russians seem quite willing to wage that has my attention.

It should have yours as well.

In our just-released documentary, Meltdown America, one of the experts noted that the Kremlin had already made moves to dethrone the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency before the renewed East-West tensions of this year. Putin has openly threatened what amounts to economic warfare as a response to sanctions placed on Russia after its Crimea grab.

The Gold Report:You warn investors against trying to time the market. If even experts don't know a bottom until it's behind them, how do regular investors know when to invest, when to buy the next tranches and when to cut losses?

Louis James: The wisdom of not trying to time the market is tried and true. Benjamin Graham said the same thing 60 years ago. I shouldn't have to defend this premise. Even though investors all know it, they fervently wish it weren't so; they just can't help themselves.

You can't time the market. A bureaucrat in Washington can open his mouth and send the price of gold up or down 5% in an afternoon.

Fortunately, we can look for value. Value tends to be slippery in the junior sector when you have a bunch of companies that, as Doug Casey famously says, are little better than burning matches. They have no income. Even the biggest players in the field are so volatile that Benjamin Graham would never touch them.

However, there are things that we can look for. We can compare companies to their peers. We can look at the ounces in the ground and see if something is out of whack. We can look at cash in the bank. The market is so beat up now that some companies with viable projects are trading for cash or less. It's actually possible in a market this beat up to make relatively low-risk acquisitions. Continue reading "Casey's Louis James Warns: 'Don't Try to Time the Market'"→

We often hear the claim that gold producers have not met investors' expectations for the past couple years. While there are many potential reasons for this, one explanation for their underperformance lies in the fact that producers diluted their share structures, leaving shareholders with smaller gains than they would have otherwise harvested.

In October of last year, we published a platinum-market overview in the Casey International Speculator and concluded by saying: "We recommend avoiding South Africa, and in this context it means staying away from platinum producers located there. If the energy situation spins out of control, miners' strikes continue, and the local trouble puts an indefinite halt to a significant portion of platinum production, some speculative opportunities may appear in the physical-metal market or platinum-backed investment tools. If we see signs of that happening, we may speculate on the results."

Although some of the events that we expected did occur this year, the "indefinite halt" has not. The nationwide wildcat strikes that ended in mid-November suggested that that scenario was possible, but the bubbling pot simmered down. We were asked by our readers to share our view on the implications of those actions on the price of platinum.